CSDE Project Overview

A Collective Initiative to Sustain the Growth of Our Global Digital Economy

The digital economy can be calculated as the share of total economic output derived from a number of broad inputs, such as digital infrastructure (hardware, software and communications equipment), digital skills, and the intermediate digital goods and services used in production. A recent study by Accenture Strategy and Oxford Economics values the United States’ digital economy in 2016 at $5.9 trillion dollars (a third of US GDP) and an earlier report suggested that the digital economy could add $1.36 trillion to the GDP of the world’s top ten economies by 2020 (the equivalent of adding another South Korea to the world economy).[1]

To protect our digital ecosystem, industry’s dedication to security must equal its passion for innovation. The Council to Secure the Digital Economy (CSDE) will engage in a common effort across the ICT segments to assess threats to the expanding digital ecosystem and drive collective solutions, framed through a shared digital economy lens. Ultimately, through engaging a diversity of views across key ICT stakeholders, CSDE will produce more robust analyses and effective solutions to strategically address these critical issues.

CSDE has identified two initial projects that will demonstrate the effectiveness of a coordinated cross-sector effort to enhance our collective ability to prepare and respond to what is widely regarded as a critical, ecosystem-wide cybersecurity threat: botnets and other automated, distributed attacks.[2] The first project will produce an international guide of anti-botnet baseline security practices for global ICT segments. The second will create an operational framework for mobilization of the enabling organizations across the ICT sector that can convene rapidly to mitigate a major botnet/distributed attack.

Both of these projects build on previous foundational work that will be reviewed and updated as appropriate. Moreover, every effort will be made to ensure that CSDE activities complement ongoing efforts in various global venues to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort.